Words Per Panel in American-Style Comic Book Writing

If you are writing a comic book that will be printed in a standard American comic page size, how many words can you fit in a panel? One answer comes from Alan Moore in a terrific interview available here:

(Alan has fetched a battered blue hardback notebook of lined A4 paper; falling apart at the seams, it looks like a family heirloom, Grandfathers old schoolbook brought down from the attic. He opens it out on the living room floor, and Alan and Dan crouch over it, Alan pointing things out to Dan). DW: At this point Mr Moore reveals his Grimoire (The book has tiny sketched-out panels (stick figures basically), laid out quite precisely to form a rough outline of a page from a Promethea script (the scene has two characters in conversation walking down a beach, with a boat on shore in the foreground in some panels). Each panel has a line drawn from it to handwritten dialogue that is accompanied by two reference numbers one for the page no. and one for the panel no.) AM: Horrible, tatty book, but what this has got in it is lots of crappy little drawings that are indecipherable to anybody else but me, but which are basically all I need for anything re writing comics. They will give me a breakdowntheyll just be sort of these pages these are bits of Promethea I will break down the page area into a number of panels. Now, Ive got a simple, mathematical mindless formula that I follow that is I mean if you look at these little bits of dialogue that go in each of the panels youll see that they have little numbers written after each of the lines and what this is is the number of words. Now, this is basically something that I took from Mort Weisinger, who was the harshest and most brutal DW: DC editor? AM: of the DC editors during the 60s. DW: Bit of a tyrant from what I hear. AM: Oh Christ, he was a monster, I remember Julie Schwarz telling me who was a lovely man he told me about Mort Weisingers funeral and this was probably just an old Jewish joke that hed adapted for Mort Weisinger but he said that apparently during Jewish funerals theres a part where people can stand up and spontaneously will say a few words about the departed personal tributes, things like that. So its Mort Weisingers funeral, and it gets to this bit in the funeral and theres absolute dead silence, and the silence just goes on and on and on and nobody gets up and

says anything and eventually this guy at the back of the synagogue gets up and says: His brother was worse! (laughter). But anyway, Mort Weisinger, because he was the toughest of the editors, I thought: Alright, Ill take his standard as the strictest. What he said was: if youve got 6 panels on a page, then the maximum number of words that you should have in each panel, is 35. No more. Thats the maximum. 35 words per panel. Also, if a balloon has more than 20 or 25 words in it, its gonna look too big. 25 words is the absolute maximum for balloon size. Right, once youve taken on board those two simple rules, laying out comics pages it gives you somewhere to start you sort of know: OK, so 6 panels, 35 words a panel, that means about 210 words per page maximum. DW: And if youve got one panel youd have 210 AM:and if youve got 2 panels youd have 105 each. If youve got 9 panels its about 23-24 words thatll be about the right balance of words and pictures. So that is why I obsessively count all the words, to make sure that Im not gonna overwhelm the pictures, that Im not gonna make oh, Ive seen some terrible comic writing where the balloons are huge, cover the entire of the background

35 words per panel in a six panel page is easier said than done, as Ive recently learned from my own modest attempts at beginning to writing a comic book script. Is this an absolute rule? Probably not, Moore doesnt always follow it. Here is two panels from Tom Strong #36, in a six panel page:

I count 35 words on the left panel and 55 on the right. Its not exactly a logical rule, either. If you are doing 5 panels on a page, with the final panel being of double length, theres no reason panels 1-4 should have more words per image. I do note that its very rare for Moore to break this rule on Tom Strong. It probably exists for a good reason. Watchmen breaks the rule throughout the book. For example, the image below, from a 9 panel page, has two panels on the left with more than 25 words per page:

Watchmen might be a special exception, however. I cant vouch for this fact being true, but I seem to recall reading somewhere that artist Dave Gibbons likes detailed stories, so, perhaps, they tried to stretch the limits of what can be fit into a panel for this particular book. Bill Willingham, author of Fables, among other things, uses a different guideline:

As a general rule, unless there is a very good reason, I never let a single word balloon exceed more than two full lines of text in a Microsoft Word document, set at 12 point type, Times New Roman font. And I try to keep it at no more than two such word balloons per panel, but sometimes that can be fudged a bit, if there are three very small word balloons for example.

Captions can occasionally exceed the two lines per caption rule, because, a rectangular-shaped caption is easier to fit in a panel that an oval-shaped balloon generally speaking.

Making the assumption that this refers to a typical page of 6 panels, I estimate this would mean a maximum of 76 words per panel. Ive found many of Willinghams comics arewordier than Moores, though not that much wordier!